Featured Stories
Selling an Edtech Business: The PositivePsychology.com Exit
PositivePsychology.com, a mission-driven edtech platform used by 19M+ professionals, was acquired in an 8-figure deal advised by FE International. This case study covers their growth, decision to sell, and the exit process.
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Slack Files for IPO, Spotify Acquires Gimlet and Anchor, Facebook Restricted by German Antitrust Watchdog: Newsletter February 8, 2019
Slack Files for IPO, Spotify Acquires Gimlet and Anchor, Facebook Restricted by German Antitrust Watchdog: Newsletter February 8, 2019
Amazon Reports Q4’18 Earnings, Google Fined by NDPC, Cloud Firestore Released from Beta: Newsletter February 1, 2019
Amazon reported better than expected performance in its Q4’18 earnings results this week. The e-commerce giant posted $72.4 billion in revenue for the holiday season, slightly beating analyst estimates and 19.8% above Q4’17 net sales. While the company did not report the exact number of net Prime signups, the holiday season saw “tens of millions of customers” across the globe start Prime free trials or activate paid memberships. Amazon also reported that more than 50% of the products sold on the platform came from SMBs (whose sales are reportedly growing faster than Amazon’s own platform sales) with over 200,000 stores surpassing $100,000 in sales on their Amazon store in 2018.
BigCommerce Migrates to Google Cloud Platform, January SaaS News Roundup, Microsoft Acquires Citus Data: Newsletter January 25, 2019
BigCommerce has announced this week the migration of its infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform. The Austin-based SaaS e-commerce platform reportedly made the move to improve international customer support as well as the speed of its service, a win for Google as the race for cloud platform market domination grows increasingly competitive. BigCommerce was utilizing traditional managed hosting and hybrid cloud in both IBM’s SoftLayer and AWS prior to the recent move, which was motivated by anti-Amazon sentiment among BigCommerce’s customer base, as well as Google’s superior network performance.
MasterCard Clarifies Subscription Payments Update, SaaS Mag Reviews APAC Market and AWS Launches Backup: Newsletter January 18, 2019
MasterCard this week clarified that they will not require SaaS and subscription software merchants to request re-authorization from customers before automatically charging recurring payments once a free trial has ended. MasterCard’s original announcement called into question whether the new policy would apply to SaaS subscriptions, but the credit card giant later updated the release to indicate that this policy will apply to merchants of physical products only. Subscription retail merchants will have to notify customers via text or email stating the subscription cost, payment date and merchant name, upon the free trial ending. This authorization will be necessary even for companies which require users to opt-in to recurring charges upon free trial signup.
AWS Launches DatabaseDB, Google Better Ads Goes Global, Spotify Focuses on Podcasting: Newsletter January 11, 2019
AWS Launches DatabaseDB, Google Better Ads Goes Global, Spotify Focuses on Podcasting: Newsletter January 11, 2019
Cloudera and Hortonworks Finalize Merger, Google Now Majority Mobile-First Indexing, Amazon and Flipkart Face Indian Regulatory Hurdles: Newsletter January 4, 2019
Cloud rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks have finalized their merger this week in an all-stock deal. First announced in October 2018, the two public companies merged at a $3 billion combined valuation, in the wake of mega open-source acquisitions by IBM (Red Hat, $34 billion), Microsoft (GitHub, $7.5 billion) and Salesforce (Mulesoft, $6.5 billion) in 2018. The joining of the two market leading vendors of Hadoop open-source software will generate bolstered resources to viably compete with Amazon Web Services.
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SaaS M&A Hits Record High in Q3, Online Holiday Sales Break New Record, Amazon Reviews Reported False: Newsletter December 21, 2018
Software Equity Group this week released the Q3 SaaS M&A report highlighting SaaS M&A deal volume breaking past quarters’ records. Transaction volume for the quarter reached 251, eclipsing the previous record set in Q2 by 11.1% and putting 2018 on track to surpass deal count in 2017. Notable software deals marked by large strategic buyers like Facebook, Salesforce and Workday contributed to the Analytics and Business Intelligence category surpassing CRM and Marketing in deal count for the first time in numerous quarters. The median EV/revenue multiple for the quarter was 4.3x.
Garrett Dimon
SaaS business founder Garrett Dimon shares his experience using FE International to successfully sell his business for a profit.
